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Oct 9, 2014

A Dramatic Black and White Tutorial by Joshua Sariñana

If you missed the interview with Joshua Sariñana yesterday, you can read it here. Today we'll take a look at a step-by-step tutorial showing Joshua's workflow to take an image from this:

...to this:

(Geri's Note: Each step is shown with the adjustments Joshua made to create the high contrasted image. Joshua's work is characterized by it's precise geometric shapes and architectural lines. A very important step in his work is the perspective correction as shown in Step 17. Hopefully you'll be inspired after following along with Joshua.)

1. Import the image into Snapseed

2. I chose to use the Drama function to darken the sky and increase the color contrast

3. Increased the saturation slightly and then moved on to the...

4. HDR option which creates an unseemly image

5. Decreased the filter strength but kept it high enough to pull out details in the clouds toward the horizon.

6. Reduced the brighteness slightly and...

7. Smoothed out some of the edges and colors

8. After the HDR option, I moved onto the Automatic icon which further increased the luminance and color contrast.

9 - 12. Next, Tune Image icon to adjust the brightness, ambiance, contrast and shadows. I look at the image as I'm adjusting to see what feels right with regard to the overall composition of the image.

13. I moved onto VSCO Cam and chose the A6/Analog option reducing the power to +6.

14. Reduced the exposure

15. Increased the sharpness (watch out because this will increase noise)...

16. And increased the Fade which can help when too much noise creeps up.

17. Exported the image and then imported into SKRWT to adjust the vertical plane and to straighten out the light posts.

18. I next used TouchRetouch to get rid of a lamp post in the lower right corner that I found distracting.

19. You can see that the program did a good job of removing the object.

20. I decided that I wanted to make the image black and white and reimported into VSCO Cam. I chose the B4 option which has very high contrast.

21. Last, I cropped the image because the vertical adjustments further increased the noise of the clouds toward the top of the image.